Houston Needs a Hand

HOUSTON — I am sure that by now many of you have seen the heartening pictures of the countless volunteers here in Houston, lining up to help out in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, kayaking to the rescue, opening their homes to strangers, feeding the hungry from their own kitchens. The scenes are even more moving in person, when you see the pickup trucks piled high with plastic bags of donations causing traffic jams around the George R. Brown Convention Center, and still more people coming in on foot, bearing boxes of diapers, dog food, bar soap, pillows, blankets and virtually anything else a human in an emergency could use.

But while I’m more than grateful for the love that locals and outsiders have shown my adopted hometown, it’s just not going to be enough. Gov. Greg Abbott said on Wednesday that the scope of this disaster is far larger than Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, which cost $50 billion and $120 billion, respectively. For that, it’s going to take strong, active, big government — something Texas famously has a problem with.

When people ask me why I live in a place with a climate like Kolkata’s, traffic rivaling that of Los Angeles and cockroaches the size of baby mice — and they ask me a lot — my answer has always been: the people. The people are just so nice.

I’ve seen countless instances of that spirit this past week. It’s a profoundly Houston crowd, the kind that always amazes those of us who were here before the great economic boom of the late 1970s and early ’80s began turning this place into an international city with global ambitions. Unloading my donations on Tuesday afternoon, I took direction from a Scottish immigrant and watched a tattooed Latino teenager ask a police officer the way to the drop-off. Prosperous matrons from the West University neighborhood, accessorized with blue latex gloves, sorted mountains of clothes.

Our richest citizens have stepped up in a big way, too. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation — he was Enron’s most brilliant energy trader — has contributed $5 million for relief. The owner of the Rockets, Leslie Alexander, has pitched in $10 million. A group that includes the owner of the Astros, Jim Crane, and the team’s foundation are in for $4 million. Several oil companies have committed to million-dollar donations as well.

The generosity of Houstonians does not surprise me. I’ve lived here for more than 40 years, and in that time I have come to take the city’s welcoming spirit for granted. “It’s what we do” has been the local explanation for the outpouring of support from ordinary folks, and it’s not an exaggeration. We have witnessed neighbor helping neighbor for decades — see Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the city took in 250,000 new residents in just a few days.

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Preparing for flood victims from the Houston area at a convention center in Dallas.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

But the challenge facing Houston now is even more daunting. One estimate reported in The Houston Chronicle set the cost of the damage at $160 billion, making this the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States. Even a city with as many wealthy citizens as Houston cannot come up with that kind of money from private donations.

Which brings me to the subject of government, or rather, the lack of it. Texans in general have never liked it much, and the unruly, unzoned, entrepreneurial residents of Houston have only recently — that is, pre-Harvey — begun to tiptoe toward changing their stance. Tax-funded safety nets for the less fortunate, for instance, have historically generated about as much affection here as, well, flood-borne floating fire-ant beds.

And since the days of Ronald Reagan, the federal government has been perceived by a significant portion of the population as an enemy of the people. Today, our supposed leaders in the White House and Congress are ready to make even more cuts to services and regulations intended to help people in time of need.

But the problem is, a disaster of this magnitude cannot be contained without the manpower, money, and specialized equipment of the public sector. The instant Federal Emergency Management Agency hospital that just unpacked itself in town is but one example of what the full force of the federal government can do.

Houston is very lucky that the $876 million in proposed cuts to FEMA by the Trump administration had not yet gone through. Housing Secretary Ben Carson, whose department is charged with helping homeowners recover, has been talking a good game, but his limited experience and attitude toward the homeless have not been encouraging in the past. I hope that our budget-slashing/anti-government senator Ted Cruz has seen the light since he voted against aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Then, too, I can’t help thinking about what could have been done had state, federal and even local authorities been less intent on convincing taxpayers that we need less, not more, government.

I am wondering what will happen to Houston and the rest of Texas because former Gov. Rick Perry and current Governor Abbott refused to accept federal funds for the expansion of Medicaid — $10 billion a year. This means that the funds to reimburse the health care providers working so hard in the aftermath of the storm will be a fraction of what they should be.

Then there is the issue of infrastructure. I can’t help thinking how much safer and drier the people in the areas around the 1930s-era Barker Cypress and Addicks Reservoirs would be today had money been spent on repairs. Or if we had enforceable laws keeping developers from building in flood plains. Or if we had the money to build the water-retention ponds that were supposed to protect us from flooding.

It could be a very long time before we begin construction on the enormous Ike Dike, which is supposed to protect our coastline from storm surges — the sort of protection taxpayers in the Netherlands have been happy to ante up for.

Which brings me to the issue of climate change. It’s the biggest cause of the disaster, and one that both state and federal officials have run from with all the speed and determination of an Olympic sprinter. Right now, gas prices are soaring because the storm knocked out so much production along the coast.

Next time, a weather disaster could hit somewhere else. As the former Houston mayor Bill White told me: “We need to invest. It’s important that we have a secure power grid in the nation’s financial center in New York. It’s important that the tech center in Silicon Valley doesn’t disappear in an earthquake.”

These are all problems that only government can tackle and only government can solve. And yet we seem to get around to them only in times of disaster.

There is one more thing that government leaders can do that no one else can, which is to make us feel that we are all in this together. I saw it on television the other night, after President Trump decided not to touch down in Houston because, supposedly, he didn’t want to get in the way of all those volunteer rescuers. And after the Corpus Christi speech he gave in which he failed to mention the victims of the flood.

In contrast, there was Ed Emmett, who as county judge is the chief executive of Harris County. He had just opened a shelter for 10,000 residents in the NRG Center, out near the old Astrodome, in the space of five and a half hours. He was talking calmly about what our government was doing to save lives. He spoke about the difference between rescue and shelter, and how rescue is high stress, and that the purpose of shelter is to lower stress, “to say, ‘Look, we’ve got you.’ ”

What a concept.

Mimi Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, is a contributing opinion writer.